Seems like the difficulty slowdown...
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbitcoin.sipa.be%2Fspeed-small-lin-10k.png&t=665&c=aPxhoPn7iQ_BMw)
... just stopped slowing down.
The spike in hashrate could very well be "good luck" by the overall network. We don't know for sure that additional mining capacity was actually added to the network.
I would speculate that since the price of bitcoin has been overall declining for some time now that less and less additional miners are going to be added to the network